Over-Exposed

This is from a new DVD collection of B film noir flicks from Columbia. However, inexplicably, this film was included in the collection--even though I'd argue that it's NOT an example of film noir. Perhaps it has a few noir elements towards the end of the film--but that is all. Instead, it's a picture about a very ambitious lady (Cleo Moore) who is bent on being a success--and possibly at all costs. I think that the presence of Ms. Moore in the film is exactly why they marketed it as noir--as she did make quite a few crime films in the 1950s.

The film begins with Moore blowing into a small town and getting arrested--even though she'd done nothing wrong. It was simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time--plus she just looked "bad"! Soon, an old photographer comes to her assistance and she, being a very jaded lady, assumes the worst. However, he really is a very decent fellow and helps her get on her feet and teaches her the trade. She also helps him stay sober and make something of himself.

Eventually, she and the old guy leave on amicable terms and she goes off to the big city to make a name for herself as a photographer. At first she tries to get a job with the local newspaper and when that doesn't pan out, she is able to make a much better living as a fashionable photographer--making the rich look great as well as doing commercial work. However, she also makes a deal with some underworld folks along the way--showing she is mostly concerned with her career and not how she makes it to the top. During this time, she has an on-again off-again relationship with a very young Richard Crenna. To me, this was a shortcoming in the film, as the crusty and highly curvaceous platinum blonde and young idealistic reporter seemed to have little in common.

Eventually, while at the very top of her career, she runs afoul of the mob so it's up to Crenna to come to save the day. This is cool, but you also wonder why he didn't just get the cops! Duh. still, it's a dandy film--mostly because Moore did such a nice job in the lead and it was nice to see her play a different role--a very competent 'dame'.

By the way, although the film played well at the time, some of it seems rather sexist and dated. Crenna wants to marry Moore and naturally it's expected that she'll give up her career--even though she is far more successful than he is! My how times have changed! Well acted and interesting, but not without a few logical flaws that, fortunately, don't harm the film so much that it isn't worth seeing. For Moore's character alone, however, it is worth seeing.

OVER-EXPOSED is hands down my all-time favorite "bad girl" film noir. Sexy blonde Cleo Moore stars as a buxom dancer who gets packed into the paddy wagon her first night on the job unaware she's working for a clip joint. When small-time photographer Raymond Greenleaf snaps a candid of Cleo and the other gals being hauled in, a furious Moore tries to buy the negative only to be told he'll give it to her if he accompanies her back to his home so he can develop the rest of the film roll. A wary, knowing Cleo feels she has no other option and does so only to find the old guy is sincere and gives her the picture.

The unlikely duo become friends and when Cleo learns photography is, in her words "a good racket for a dame", she has Greenleaf teach her all he can about it while Moore builds up his profits telling rich old broads who come in for portraits, their pictures have been blown up and entered into a photography exhibit which of course makes the old vain crones insist on purchasing the large colored edition of their picture.

Finally when Cleo has become an impressive photographer herself she packs up and heads for New York City while she tries to sell her wares (the pictures, you dirty minds). There she meets handsome newspaper reporter Richard Crenna, gracious society dame Isobel Elsom, leering boss Jack Albertson, jealous coworker Jeanne Cooper, and select mobsters.

This is one of the enjoyable little film noirs I've ever encountered, full of pithy lines ("you'd use your grandmother's bones to pry open a cash register" an effete nightclub manager snaps at our heroine) and an utterly wonderful, spirited performance by Cleo Moore, as a "bad girl" who might not be so bad after all. There were a lot of sexy blondes in movies back in the 1950's and I've always felt Cleo was not only one of the most attractive but one of the better actresses of the lot. It's sad her career didn't progress much above the B level but she really shines in this film. This movie enjoyed a revival in 2009 at UCLA's Film and Television Archive museum as part of a retrospective of overlooked film noirs, was released on DVD in 2010 by Sony and hopefully it will eventually find it's way to TCM.

Over-Exposed (1956)

"You'd use your grandmother's bones to pry open a cash register." That's the best line in "Over-Exposed," a surprisingly solid crime and ambition (and cheesecake) movie. But then, the second best line is when the leading bleach blonde model/photographer played by Cleo Moore has made it big, and she says, "Green becomes me."

This is a better movie than it could have been, with little known cast and crew and a story that seems at a glance to be a cross between formulaic gangster and splashy girl-photographer with some spunk. There is a love interest (a really nice guy who sees through our heroine's hard gloss to a decent kid inside) who comes and goes and seems to a lifeline to her salvation. But the real lure overall is success and money, which is found at a nightclub run by classy thugs. The movie remains a bit cheesy throughout, however, letting Lila be a club photographer wearing scant clothes, kind of like a cigarette girls did in those days.

One of the surprises was how central and accurate the photography was to the whole movie, start to finish, and I'm not talking cinematography, which was good, but the role of the photography in the plot, including shooting and developing and retouching. And blackmail, by the end. The friendly old man photographer at the start is a strong balance to the wayward and snippy young girl (Moore), and the two end up helping each other throughout.

So there is a lot going on, actually, and it's pretty well done in the main, with those occasional hiccups of a lower budget enterprise. Look for Constance Towers, who later made fame in a couple of hard hitting Sam Fuller movies (like "Naked Kiss"). Give this one a go. And know that the second half is more exciting than the first.

In Over-Exposed, Cleo Moore makes an ascent from B-Girl to reigning photographer of café society that's as rapid as it is unpersuasive. She's a mid-1950s version of Blonde Ambition, or, as she puts it, `Where there's money, there's Lila – green becomes me.'

She wasn't always Lila, least of all not the night the clip joint she'd just started working for got raided. The alcoholic, has-been shutterbug (Raymond Greenleaf) who snaps her mug outside the police station takes pity on her by showing her the rudiments of his craft. She's a quick study and, more to the point, a shrewd operator, buttering up monied old janes with appeals to their deluded vanity.

Off to New York, she tries in vain to land a job as a photojournalist, though she befriends a young reporter (Richard Crenna). Instead, she opts for the glamor and easy money to be had as a `flash-girl' in a nightclub; on the side, she snaps compromising photos for a sleazy columnist (James O'Rear). Soon, she holds a concession at the poshest watering-hole in town, the Club Coco; the fact that it's mob-operated doesn't bother her, but it bothers straight-arrow Crenna, who's thinking of popping the question.

Invited to snap a birthday celebration at the club for grand dame Isobel Elsom, Moore inadvertently records the dowager's death throes as she slumps while displaying her newly acquired skills at the mambo. Moore decently destroys the photo, only to have O'Rear steal and publish the negative; closing ranks, her society clients drop her like a hot brick. Up against a wall, Moore decides to dabble in blackmail, using as bait another inadvertent picture – one that demolishes the alibi of one of club's mob backers, wanted for murder....

With elements of Shakedown and the soon-to-come Sweet Smell of Success, Over-Exposed stays a little too nice to rival them. It pulls back from any real nastiness and grit in its eagerness to keep the hard cookie Moore soft at the center (and insure smiles at the ending). Still, there are smirky glimpses into the world of parasites and lick-spittles who buzz around money, as well as welcome, old-school turns from Greenleaf and Elsom. Moore flashes solid credentials as a brassy schemer, while Crenna takes yet another step in the career that would stretch, chiefly through the magic of television, from Our Miss Brooks to The Rape of Richard Beck. Over-Exposed, diverting enough to watch, is quite under-developed.

Cleo Moore is front & center in this tawdry 1956 tale of the rise & fall of a model/photographer who gets involved in one grift too many. Moore has just been involved at a club's bust (she didn't know what kind of club she got a job at) & the cops have warned her to leave town but no sooner does she step towards a bus stop, a kindly photographer, played by Raymond Greenleaf, offers her a room for the night but being strapped for cash, when he offers to teach her the photography ropes, she obliges. Getting a gig at a prominent nightclub, Moore soon rises in the ranks gaining the attention of a gossip rag's reporter but also the movers & shakers in town. One night while taking a photo of a noted dowager, she catches in the background the club's silent partner, a gangster, who was implicated in a murder the same night so when the dowager dies later on the dancefloor during her birthday, the smut peddler hopes to publish the pic but when Moore resists, he steals & publishes the pic anyway. No amount of protestations about her innocence in the matter, Moore still becomes a persona non grata until she remembers the gangster's pic. Will she successfully blackmail the wanted man for a payout or die trying? Moore, never rising to the echelon of her fellow blonde contemporaries like Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren or Jayne Mansfield, nonetheless does the best she can by the material & comes away pretty much unscathed (all bluster & suspicion whenever offered a helping hand) but considering she never did get to work w/A list directors (or even B listers), she knew when to step away. Also starring future Colonel Trautman, Richard Crenna, as Moore's reporter beau.